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Life of Sir Walter Scott

Richard H. Hutton

Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting, and fighting clan.

by Richard H. Hutton

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888

The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.

PREFATORY NOTE

It will be observed that the greater part of this little
book has been taken in one form or other from Lockhart's
Life of Sir Walter Scott, in ten volumes. No introduction
to Scott would be worth much in which that course was
not followed. Indeed, excepting Sir Walter's own writings,
there is hardly any other great source of information
about him; and that is so full, that hardly anything needful
to illustrate the subject of Scott's life remains untouched.
As regards the only matters of controversy,---
Scott's relations to the Ballantynes, I have taken care to
check Mr. Lockhart's statements by reading those of the
representatives of the Ballantyne brothers; but with this
exception, Sir Walter's own works and Lockhart's life
of him are the great authorities concerning his character
and his story.

Just ten years ago Mr. Gladstone, in expressing to
the late Mr. Hope Scott the great delight which the
perusal of Lockhart's life of Sir Walter bad given him,
wrote, "I may be wrong, but I am vaguely under the
impression that it has never had a really wide circulation.
If so, it is the saddest pity, and I should greatly like
(without any censure on its present length) to see published
an abbreviation of it." Mr. Gladstone did not
then know that as long ago as 1848 Mr. Lockhart did
himself prepare such an abbreviation, in which the original
eighty-four chapters were compressed into eighteen,
---though the abbreviation contained additions as well as
compressions. But even this abridgment is itself a
bulky volume of 800 pages, containing, I should think,
considerably more than a third of the reading in the original
ten volumes, and is not, therefore, very likely to be
preferred to the completer work. In some respects I hope
that this introduction may supply, better than that bulky
abbreviation, what Mr. Gladstone probably meant to
suggest,---some slight miniature taken from the great picture
with care enough to tempt on those who look on it
to the study of the fuller life, as well as of that image of
Sir Walter which is impressed by his own hand upon
his works.

CHAPTER I: ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD

Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great
riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father---
a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor---was the
first of his race to adopt a town life and a sedentary profession.
Sir Walter was the lineal descendant---six
generations removed---of that Walter Scott commemorated
in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, who is known
in Border history and legend as Auld Wat of Harden.
Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir Gideon Murray,
of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's
lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being
hanged on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the
ugliest of Sir Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meiklemouthed
Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize of ugliness
among the women of four counties. Sir William was a handsome
man. He took three days to consider the alternative
proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed
lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition
which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent
wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which
her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meiklemouthed
Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large
mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him
who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage
as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than
half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times---i. e.,
the middle of the sixteenth century---and those of Sir
Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's
great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in
Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would
never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts,
and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues
on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running
the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor. This was
the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction
to the last canto of Marmion:---



"And thus my Christmas still I hold,
Where my great grandsire came of old,
With amber beard and flaxen hair,
And reverend apostolic air,---
The feast and holy tide to share,
And mix sobriety with wine,
And honest mirth with thoughts divine;
Small thought was his in after time
E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme,
The simple sire could only boast
That he was loyal to his cost;
The banish'd race of kings revered,
And lost his land---but kept his beard."

Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental
Stuart bias which his better judgment condemned, but
which seemed to be rather part of his blood than of his
mind. And most useful to him this sentiment undoubtedly
was in helping him to restore the mould and
fashion of the past. Beardie's second son was Sir
Walter's grandfather, and to him he owed not only his
first childish experience of the delights of country life,
but also,---in his own estimation at least,---that risky,
speculative, and sanguine spirit which had so much influence
over his fortunes. The good man of Sandy-Knowe,
wishing to breed sheep, and being destitute of
capital, borrowed 30_l._ from a shepherd who was willing
to invest that sum for him in sheep; and the two set off
to purchase a flock near Wooler, in Northumberland;
but when the shepherd had found what he thought
would suit their purpose, he returned to find his master
galloping about a fine hunter, on which he had spent
the whole capital in hand. This speculation, however,
prospered. A few days later Robert Scott displayed
the qualities of the hunter to such admirable effect
with John Scott of Harden's hounds, that he sold the
horse for double the money he had given, and, unlike his
grandson, abandoned speculative purchases there and
then. In the latter days of his clouded fortunes, after
Ballantyne's and Constable's failure, Sir Walter was accustomed
to point to the picture of his grandfather and
say, "Blood will out: my building and planting was
but his buying the hunter before he stocked his sheep-walk,
over again." But Sir Walter added, says Mr.
Lockhart, as he glanced at the likeness of his own staid
and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have
a thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the
case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances,
for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that
disposition towards conscientious, plodding industry,
legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a
generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his
obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by
him as they were, turned a great genius, which, especially
considering the harebrained element in him, might
easily have been frittered away or devoted to worthless
ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with
so grand an impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude.
Sir Walter's father reminds one in not a few
of the formal and rather martinetish traits which are
related of him, of the father of Goethe, "a formal man,
with strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately
orderly (he thought a good book nothing without a good
binding), and never so much excited as by a necessary
deviation from the `preestablished harmony' of household
rules." That description would apply almost wholly
to the sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has
given us under the thin disguise of Alexander Fairford,
Writer to the Signet, in Redgauntlet, a figure confessedly
meant, in its chief features, to represent his father. To
this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later journals, the
trait that his father was a man of fine presence, who conducted
all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur
and dignity of air, and "absolutely loved a funeral."
"He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of
cousins merely for the pleasure of being at their
funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and
I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me with
him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies;
but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental,
I escaped as often as I could." This strong dash of the
conventional in Scott's father, this satisfaction in seeing
people fairly to the door of life, and taking his final leave
of them there, with something of a ceremonious flourish
of observance, was, however, combined with a much
nobler and deeper kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used
to say that his father had lost no small part of a very
flourishing business, by insisting that his clients should do
their duty to their own people better than they were
themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this generous
strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy
for others, the son had as much as the father.

Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the
daughter of a physician, had been better educated than
most Scotchwomen of her day, in spite of having been
sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable Mrs.
Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction
at least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could
not enjoy a comfortable rest in her chair, but "took as
much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if
she had still been under the stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie."
None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly, comfortable
woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored,
vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his
mother's death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says, "She had
a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information
and natural talent, and as she was very old, and
had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the
least exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures
of the past age. If I have been able to do anything
in the way of painting the past times, it is very much
from the studies with which she presented me. She
connected a long period of time with the present generation,
for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person
who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver
Cromwell's subsequent entry into Edinburgh." On the
day before the stroke of paralysis which carried her off, she
had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with great
accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and
pointed out wherein it differed from the novel. She had
all the names of the parties, and pointed out (for she
was a great genealogist) their connexion with existing
families."<*> Sir Walter records many evidences of the

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, vi. 172--3. The edition referred to is
* throughout the edition of 1839 in ten volumes.

tenderness of his mother's nature, and he returned
warmly her affection for himself. His executors, in lifting
up his desk, the evening after his burial, found "arranged
in careful order a series of little objects, which had
obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on
them every morning before he began his tasks. These
were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his
mother's toilette, when he, a sickly child, slept in her
dressing-room,---the silver taper-stand, which the young
advocate had bought for her with his first five-guinea fee,
---a row of small packets inscribed with her hand, and
containing the hair of those of her offspring that had died
before her,---his father's snuff-box, and etui-case,---and
more things of the like sort."<*> A story, characteristic

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, x. 241.

of both Sir Walter's parents, is told by Mr. Lockhart which
will serve better than anything I can remember to bring
the father and mother of Scott vividly before the imagination.
His father, like Mr. Alexander Fairford, in
Redgauntlet, though himself a strong Hanoverian, inherited
enough feeling for the Stuarts from his grandfather
Beardie, and sympathized enough with those who were, as
he neutrally expressed it, "out in '45," to ignore as much
as possible any phrases offensive to the Jacobites. For
instance, he always called Charles Edward not the Pretender
but the Chevalier,-and he did business for many
Jacobites:---

"Mrs. Scott's curiosity was strongly excited one autumn
by the regular appearance at a certain hour every evening
of a sedan chair, to deposit a person carefully muffled up in
a mantle, who was immediately ushered into her husband's
private room, and commonly remained with him there until
long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family. Mr.
Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness that
irritated the lady's feelings more and more; until at last
she could bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as
she heard the bell ring as for the stranger's chair to carry
him off, she made her appearance within the forbidden
parlour with a salver in her hand, observing that she
thought the gentlemen had sat so long they would be
better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to
bring some for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of
distinguished appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the
lady and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows,
and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A
moment afterwards the visitor withdrew, and Mr. Scott,
lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left
empty on the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement.
The lady exclaimed for her china, but was put to silence by
her husband's saying, `I can forgive your little curiosity,
madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into
my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy
to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor
of mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton's.'

"This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince
Charles Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part
of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and
fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late
master's adherents, when---

"Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died,
The brave, Balmerino were on thy side."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 243--4.

"Broughton's saucer"---i. e. the saucer belonging to the
cup thus sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against
one who had redeemed his own life and fortune by turning
king's evidence against one of Prince Charles Stuart's
adherents,---was carefully preserved by his son, and hung
up in his first study, or "den," under a little print of
Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind
very vividly the character of Sir Walter's parents. The
eager curiosity of the active-minded woman, whom "the
honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been able to keep upright
in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to
unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing
glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting
under his wife's personal attention to a dishonoured man,
and making her pay the penalty by dashing to pieces the
cup which the king's evidence had used,---again, the
visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that the
Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness
and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to
reject the courtesy of the wife, though he could not get
anything but cold legal advice from the husband:---all
these are figures which must have acted on the youthful
imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped
themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical
kaleidoscope which was always before his mind's eye, as
he mused upon that past which he was to restore for us
with almost more than its original freshness of life. With
such scenes touching even his own home, Scott must
have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind,
the more romantic, against the more sober and rational
considerations, which had so recently divided house
against house, even in the same family and clan. That the
stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so much of
his grandfather Beardie's respect for the adherents of the
exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy
as even more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the
Stuarts' professed partisans, and have lent a new sanction
to the romantic drift of his mother's old traditions, and
one to which they must have been indebted for a great
part of their fascination.

Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom
the first six died in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh,
on the 15th of August, 1771. Of the six later-born
children, all but one were boys, and the one sister
was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have
pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen
months the boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long
lameness; and this was the reason why the child was sent
to reside with his grandfather---the speculative grandfather,
who had doubled his capital by buying a racehorse
instead of sheep---at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower
of Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of The
Eve of St. John, in the neighbourhood of some fine crags.
To these crags the housemaid sent from Edinburgh to
look after him, used to carry him up, with a design
(which she confessed to the housekeeper)---due, of
course, to incipient insanity---of murdering the child
there, and burying him in the moss. Of course the maid
was dismissed. After this the child used to be sent out,
when the weather was fine, in the safer charge of the
shepherd, who would often lay him beside the sheep.
Long afterwards Scott told Mr. Skene, during an excursion
with Turner, the great painter, who was drawing his illustration
of Smailholm tower for one of Scott's works, that
"the habit of lying on the turf there among the sheep and
the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for
these animals, which it had ever since retained." Being
forgotten one day upon the knolls when a thunderstorm
came on, his aunt ran out to bring him in, and found him
shouting, "Bonny! bonny!" at every flash of lightning.
One of the old servants at Sandy-Knowe spoke of the
child long afterwards as "a sweet-tempered bairn, a
darling with all about the house," and certainly the
miniature taken of him in his seventh year confirms the
impression thus given. It is sweet-tempered above everything,
and only the long upper lip and large mouth,
derived from his ancestress, Meg Murray, convey the promise
of the power which was in him. Of course the high,
almost conical forehead, which gained him in his later
days from his comrades at the bar the name of "Old
Peveril," in allusion to "the peak" which they saw towering
high above the heads of other men as he approached, is not
so much marked beneath the childish locks of this miniature
as it was in later life; and the massive, and, in
repose, certainly heavy face of his maturity, which conveyed
the impression of the great bulk of his character, is
still quite invisible under the sunny ripple of childish
earnestness and gaiety. Scott's hair in childhood was
light chestnut, which turned to nut brown in youth. His
eyebrows were bushy, for we find mention made of them as
a "pent-house." His eyes were always light blue. They
had in them a capacity, on the one hand, for enthusiasm,
sunny brightness, and even harebrained humour,
and on the other for expressing determined resolve and
kindly irony, which gave great range of expression to
the face. There are plenty of materials for judging what
sort of a boy Scott was. In spite of his lameness, he early
taught himself to clamber about with an agility that few
children could have surpassed, and to sit his first pony---a
little Shetland, not bigger than a large Newfoundland
dog, which used to come into the house to be fed by him---
even in gallops on very rough ground. He became very
early a declaimer. Having learned the ballad of Hardy
Knute, he shouted it forth with such pertinacious enthusiasm
that the clergyman of his grandfather's parish
complained that he "might as well speak in a cannon's
mouth as where that child was." At six years of age Mrs.
Cockburn described him as the most astounding genius
of a boy, she ever saw. "He was reading a poem to his
mother when I went in. I made him read on: it was
the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the
storm. `There's the mast gone,' says he; `crash it goes;
they will all perish.' After his agitation he turns to me,
`That is too melancholy,' says he; `I had better read
you something more amusing.' " And after the call, he
told his aunt he liked Mrs. Cockburn, for "she was a
virtuoso like himself." "Dear Walter," says Aunt Jenny,
"what is a virtuoso?" "Don't ye know? Why, it's one
who wishes and will know everything." This last scene
took place in his father's house in Edinburgh; but Scott's
life at Sandy-Knowe, including even the old minister, Dr.
Duncan, who so bitterly complained of the boy's ballad-spouting,
is painted for us, as everybody knows, in the
picture of his infancy given in the introduction to the
third canto of Marmion:---

"It was a barren scene and wild,
Where naked cliffs were rudely piled:
But ever and anon between
Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green;
And well the lonely infant knew
Recesses where the wall-flower grew,
And honeysuckle loved to crawl
Up the low crag and ruin'd wall.
I deem'd such nooks the sweetest shade
The sun in all its round survey'd;
And still I thought that shatter'd tower
The mightiest work of human power,
And marvell'd as the aged hind
With some strange tale bewitch'd my mind,
Of forayers, who, with headlong force,
Down from that strength had spurr'd their horse,
Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviots blue,
And, home returning, fill'd the hall
With revel, wassail-rout, and brawl.
Methought that still with trump and clang
The gateway's broken arches rang;
Methought grim features, seam'd with scars,
Glared through the window's rusty bars;
And ever, by the winter hearth,
Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
Of lovers' slights, of ladies' charms,
Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms,
Of patriot battles, won of old
By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
Of later fields of feud and fight,
When, pouring from their Highland height,
The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
Had swept the scarlet ranks away.
While, stretch'd at length upon the floor,
Again I fought each combat o'er,
Pebbles and shells in order laid,
The mimic ranks of war display'd;
And onward still the Scottish lion bore,
And still the scattered Southron fled before.
Still, with vain fondness, could I trace
Anew each kind familiar face
That brighten'd at our evening fire!
From the thatch'd mansion's grey-haird sire,
Wise without learning, plain and good,
And sprung of Scotland's gentler blood;
Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen,
Show'd what in youth its glance had been;
Whose doom discarding neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought;
To him the venerable priest,
Our frequent and familiar guest,
Whose life and manners well could paint
Alike the student and the saint;
Alas! whose speech too oft I broke
With gambol rude and timeless joke;
For I was wayward, bold, and wild,
A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child;
But, half a plague and half a jest,
Was still endured, beloved, caress'd."

A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with
that spirit was combined an active and subduing sweetness
which could often conquer, as by a sudden spell,
those whom the boy loved. Towards those, however, whom
he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative,
the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of
a pet starling, which the child had partly tamed. "I
flew at his throat like a wild-cat," he said, in recalling
the circumstance, fifty years later, in his journal on
occasion of the old laird's death; "and was torn from
him with no little difficulty." And, judging from this
journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the
laird of Raeburn. Towards those whom he loved but
had offended, his manner was very different. "I seldom,"
said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, "had occasion all the
time I was in the family to find fault with him, even for
trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of
which he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang
up, threw his arms about my neck and kissed me." And
the quaint old gentleman adds this commentary:---"By
such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in a
moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul
melted into tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my
tears with his." This spontaneous and fascinating sweetness
of his childhood was naturally overshadowed to some
extent in later life by Scott's masculine and proud character,
but it was always in him. And there was
much of true character in the child behind this sweetness.
He had wonderful self-command, and a peremptory
kind of good sense, even in his infancy. While yet
a child under six years of age, hearing one of the servants
beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing
that if he listened, it would scare away his night's
rest, he acted for himself with all the promptness of an
elder person acting for him, and, in spite of the fascination
of the subject, resolutely muffled his head in the
bedclothes and refused to hear the tale. His sagacity
in judging of the character of others was shown, too, even
as a school-boy; and once it led him to take an advantage
which caused him many compunctions in after-life,
whenever he recalled his skilful puerile tactics. On one
occasion---I tell the story as he himself rehearsed it to
Samuel Rogers, almost at the end of his life, after his
attack of apoplexy, and just before leaving England
for Italy in the hopeless quest of health---he had long
desired to get above a school-fellow in his class, who
defied all his efforts, till Scott noticed that whenever a
question was asked of his rival, the lad's fingers grasped
a particular button on his waistcoat, while his mind went
in search of the answer. Scott accordingly anticipated
that if he could remove this button, the boy would be
thrown out, and so it proved. The button was cut off,
and the next time the lad was questioned, his fingers
being unable to find the button, and his eyes going in
perplexed search after his fingers, he stood confounded,
and Scott mastered by strategy the place which he could
not gain by mere industry. "Often in after-life," said
Scott, in narrating the man<oe>uvre to Rogers, "has the sight
of him smote me as I passed by him; and often have I
resolved to make him some reparation, but it ended in
good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor
fellow! I believe he is dead; he took early to drinking."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 128.

Scott's school reputation was one of irregular ability; he
"glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to the
other," and received more praise for his interpretation of
the spirit of his authors than for his knowledge of their
language. Out of school his fame stood higher. He
extemporized innumerable stories to which his school-fellows
delighted to listen; and, in spite of his lameness,
he was always in the thick of the "bickers," or street
fights with the boys of the town, and renowned for his
boldness in climbing the "kittle nine stanes" which are
"projected high in air from the precipitous black granite
of the Castle-rock." At home he was much bullied by his
elder brother Robert, a lively lad, not without some powers
of verse-making, who went into the navy, then in an
unlucky moment passed into the merchant service of the
East India Company, and so lost the chance of distinguishing
himself in the great naval campaigns of Nelson.
Perhaps Scott would have been all the better for a sister
a little closer to him than Anne---sickly and fanciful---
appears ever to have been. The masculine side of life
appears to predominate a little too much in his school
and college days, and he had such vast energy, vitality,
and pride, that his life at this time would have borne a
little taming under the influence of a sister thoroughly
congenial to him. In relation to his studies he was
wilful, though not perhaps perverse. He steadily declined,
for instance, to learn Greek, though he mastered
Latin pretty fairly. After a time spent at the High
School, Edinburgh, Scott was sent to a school at Kelso,
where his master made a friend and companion of him,
and so poured into him a certain amount of Latin scholarship
which he would never otherwise have obtained. I
need hardly add that as a boy Scott was, so far as a boy
could be, a Tory---a worshipper of the past, and a great
Conservative of any remnant of the past which reformers
wished to get rid of. In the autobiographical fragment
of 1808, he says, in relation to these school-days, "I,
with my head on fire for chivalry, was a Cavalier; my
friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory, and he was a
Whig; I hated Presbyterians, and admired Montrose
with his victorious Highlanders; he liked the Presbyterian
Ulysses, the deep and politic Argyle; so that we
never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were
always amicable." And he adds candidly enough: "In
all these tenets there was no real conviction on my part,
arising out of acquaintance with the views or principles
of either party. . . . . I took up politics at that
period, as King Charles II. did his religion, from an idea
that the Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike persuasion
of the two." And the uniformly amicable character
of these controversies between the young people, itself
shows how much more they were controversies of the
imagination than of faith. I doubt whether Scott's convictions
on the issues of the Past were ever very much
more decided than they were during his boyhood; though
undoubtedly he learned to understand much more profoundly
what was really, held by the ablest men on both
sides of these disputed issues. The result, however, was,
I think, that while he entered better and better into both
sides as life went on, he never adopted either with any
earnestness of conviction, being content to admit, even
to himself, that while his feelings leaned in one direction,
his reason pointed decidedly in the other; and holding
that it was hardly needful to identify himself positively
with either. As regarded the present, however, feeling
always carried the day, Scott was a Tory all his life.

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH---CHOICE OF A PROFESSION.

As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and
began his legal studies, first as apprentice to his father,
and then in the law classes of the University, he became
noticeable to all his friends for his gigantic memory,---the
rich stores of romantic material with which it was loaded,
---his giant feats of industry for any cherished purpose,---
his delight in adventure and in all athletic enterprises,---
his great enjoyment of youthful "rows," so long as they
did not divide the knot of friends to which he belonged,
and his skill in peacemaking amongst his own set. During
his apprenticeship his only means of increasing his slender
allowance with funds which he could devote to his
favourite studies, was to earn money by copying, and he
tells us himself that he remembered writing "120 folio
pages with no interval either for food or rest," fourteen
or fifteen hours' very hard work at the very least,---
expressly for this purpose.

In the second year of Scott's apprenticeship, at about
the age of sixteen, he had an attack of h<ae>morrhage,
no recurrence of which took place for some forty
years, but which was then the beginning of the end.
During this illness silence was absolutely imposed
upon him,---two old ladies putting their fingers on
their lips whenever he offered to speak. It was at this
time that the lad began his study of the scenic side of
history, and especially of campaigns, which he illustrated
for himself by the arrangement of shells, seeds, and
pebbles, so as to represent encountering armies, in the
manner referred to (and referred to apparently in anticipation
of a later stage of his life than that he was then speaking
of) in the passage from the introduction to the third
canto of Marmion which I have already given. He also
managed so to arrange the looking-glasses in his room as
to see the troops march out to exercise in the meadows,
as he lay in bed. His reading was almost all in the
direction of military exploit, or romance and medi<ae>val
legend and the later border songs of his own
country. He learned Italian and read Ariosto. Later
he learned Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose
"novelas," he said, "first inspired him with the ambition
to excel in fiction;" and all that he read and admired
he remembered. Scott used to illustrate the capricious
affinity of his own memory for what suited it, and its
complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of
Meikledale's answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented
him on the strength of his memory. "No, sir," said the
old Borderer, "I have no command of my memory. It
only retains what hits my fancy; and probably, Sir,
if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not
be able, when you finished, to remember a word you had
been saying." Such a memory, when it belongs to a man
of genius, is really a sieve of the most valuable kind.
It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and
assimilates what is suited to it. In his very last days,
when he was visiting Italy for the first time, Scott delighted
in Malta, for it recalled to him Vertot's Knights of Malta,
and much other mediaeval story which he had pored over
in his youth. But when his friends descanted to him at
Pozzuoli on the Therm<ae>---commonly called the Temple
of Serapis---among the ruins of which he stood, he only
remarked that he would believe whatever he was told,
"for many of his friends, and particularly Mr. Morritt,
had frequently tried to drive classical antiquities, as they
are called, into his head, but they had always found his
skull too thick." Was it not perhaps some deep literary
instinct, like that here indicated, which made him, as a
lad, refuse so steadily to learn Greek, and try to prove to
his indignant professor that Ariosto was superior to
Homer? Scott afterwards deeply regretted this neglect
of Greek; but I cannot help thinking that his regret was
misplaced. Greek literature would have brought before
his mind standards of poetry and art which could not
but have both deeply impressed and greatly daunted an
intellect of so much power; I say both impressed and
daunted, because I believe that Scott himself would never
have succeeded in studies of a classical kind, while he
might---like Goethe perhaps---have been either misled, by
admiration for that school, into attempting what was not
adopted to his genius, or else disheartened in the work
for which his character and ancestry really fitted him.
It has been said that there is a real affinity between Scott
and Homer. But the long and refluent music of Homer,
once naturalized in his mind, would have discontented
him with that quick, sharp, metrical tramp of his own moss-troopers,
to which alone his genius as a poet was perfectly
suited.

It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes,
Scott could scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though
the inference would, I believe, be quite mistaken. His
father, however, reproached him with being better fitted for
a pedlar than a lawyer,---so persistently did he trudge over
all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties
of nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or
legend. On one occasion when, with their last penny spent,
Scott and one of his companions had returned to Edinburgh,
living during their last day on drinks of milk
offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and haws
on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he
had wished for George Primrose's power of playing on the
flute in order to earn a meal by the way, old Mr. Scott,
catching grumpily at the idea, replied, "I greatly doubt, sir,
you were born for nae better then a gangrel scrape-gut,"---
a speech which very probably suggested his son's conception
of Darsie Latimer's adventures with the blind fiddler,
"Wandering Willie," in Redgauntlet. And, it is true that
these were the days of mental and moral fermentation,
what was called in Germany the Sturm-und-Drang, the
"fret-and-fury" period of Scott's life, so far as one so
mellow and genial in temper ever passed through a period
of fret and fury at all. In other words these were the days
of rapid motion, of walks of thirty miles a day which
the lame lad yet found no fatigue to him; of mad enterprises,
scrapes and drinking-bouts, in one of which Scott
was half persuaded by his friends that he actually sang
a song for the only time in his life. But even in these
days of youthful sociability, with companions of his
own age, Scott was always himself, and his imperious will
often asserted itself. Writing of this time, some thirty-five
years or so later, he said, "When I was a boy, and
on foot expeditions, as we had many, no creature could be
so indifferent which way our course was directed, and I
acquiesced in what any one proposed; but if I was once
driven to make a choice, and felt piqued in honour to
maintain my proposition, I have broken off from the
whole party, rather than yield to any one." No doubt,
too, in that day of what be himself described as "the
silly smart fancies that ran in my brain like the bubbles
in a glass of champagne, as brilliant to my thinking, as
intoxicating, as evanescent," solitude was no real deprivation
to him; and one can easily imagine him marching off
on his solitary way after a dispute with his companions,
reciting to himself old songs or ballads, with that
noticeable but altogether indescribable play of the upper
lip, which Mr. Lockhart thinks suggested to one of
Scott's most intimate friends, on his first acquaintance
with him, the grotesque notion that he had been "a
hautboy-player." This was the first impression formed
of Scott by William Clerk, one of his earliest and life-long
friends. It greatly amused Scott, who not only had
never played on any instrument in his life, but could
hardly make shift to join in the chorus of a popular song
without marring its effect; but perhaps the impression
suggested was not so very far astray after all. Looking
to the poetic side of his character, the trumpet certainly
would have been the instrument that would have best
symbolized the spirit both of Scott's thought and of his
verses. Mr. Lockhart himself, in summing up his impressions
of Sir Walter, quotes as the most expressive of his
lines:---

"Sound, sound the clarion! fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth a world without a name."

And undoubtedly this gives us the key-note of Scott's
personal life as well as of his poetic power. Above everything
he was high-spirited, a man of noble, and, at the same
time, of martial feelings. Sir Francis Doyle speaks very
justly of Sir Walter as "among English singers the
undoubted inheritor of that trumpet-note, which, under
the breath of Homer, has made the wrath of Achilles
immortal;" and I do not doubt that there was something
in Scott's face, and especially in the expression of his
mouth, to suggest this even to his early college companions.
Unfortunately, however, even "one crowded
hour of glorious life" may sometimes have a "sensual"
inspiration, and in these days of youthful adventure, too
many such hours seem to have owed their inspiration
to the Scottish peasant's chief bane, the Highland whisky.
In his eager search after the old ballads of the Border,
Scott had many a blithe adventure, which ended only too
often in a carouse. It was soon after this time that he first
began those raids into Liddesdale, of which all the world
has enjoyed the records in the sketches---embodied subsequently
in Guy Mannering---of Dandie Dinmont, his pony
Dumple, and the various Peppers and Mustards from
whose breed there were afterwards introduced into Scott's
own family, generations of terriers, always named, as Sir
Walter expressed it, after "the cruet." I must quote the
now classic record of those youthful escapades:---

"Eh me," said Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these
Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and drollery
as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were either
laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how
brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the
lave did; never made him sel' the great man or took ony airs
in the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these jaunts,
grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and drunk---(this, however,
even in our wildest rambles, was but rare)---but drunk
or sober he was aye the gentleman. He looked excessively
heavy and stupid when he was fou, but he was never out o'
gude humour."

One of the stories of that time will illustrate better
the wilder days of Scott's youth than any comment:---

"On reaching one evening," says Mr. Lockhart, some
Charlieshope or other (I forget the name) among those wildernesses,
they found a kindly reception as usual: but to
their agreeable surprise, after some days of hard living, a
measured and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon
after supper, at which a bottle of elderberry wine alone had
been produced, a young student of divinity who happened to
be in the house was called upon to take the `big ha' Bible,' in
the good old fashion of Burns' Saturday Night: and some
progress had been already made in the service, when the good
man of the farm, whose `tendency,' as Mr. Mitchell says,
`was soporific,' scandalized his wife and the dominie by starting
suddenly from his knees, and rubbing his eyes, with a
stentorian exclamation of `By ------! here's the keg at last!'
and in tumbled, as be spake the word, a couple of sturdy
herdsmen, whom, on hearing, a day before, of the advocates
approaching visit, he had despatched to a certain smuggler's
haunt at some considerable distance in quest of a supply of
run brandy from the Solway frith. The pious `exercise' of
the household was hopelessly interrupted. With a thousand
apologies for his hitherto shabby entertainment, this jolly
Elliot or Armstrong had the welcome keg mounted on the
table without a moment's delay, and gentle and simple, not
forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about it until
daylight streamed in upon the party. Sir Walter Scott
seldom failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale
companions, to mimic with infinite humour the sudden
outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of horses' feet,
which he knew to indicate the arrival of the keg, the consternation
of the dame, and the rueful despair with which
the young clergyman closed the book."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 269--71.

No wonder old Mr. Scott felt some doubt of his son's
success at the bar, and thought him more fitted in many
respects for a "gangrel scrape-gut."<*>

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, i. 206.

In spite of all this love of excitement, Scott became a
sound lawyer, and might have been a great lawyer, had not
his pride of character, the impatience of his genius, and
the stir of his imagination rendered him indisposed to
wait and slave in the precise manner which the prepossessions
of solicitors appoint.

For Scott's passion for romantic literature was not at
all the sort of thing which we ordinarily mean by boys'
or girls' love of romance. No amount of drudgery or
labour deterred Scott from any undertaking on the prosecution
of which he was bent. He was quite the reverse,
indeed, of what is usually meant by sentimental, either in
his manners or his literary interests. As regards the
history of his own country he was no mean antiquarian.
Indeed he cared for the mustiest antiquarian researches---
of the medi<ae>val kind---so much, that in the depth of his
troubles he speaks of a talk with a Scotch antiquary and
herald as one of the things which soothed him most.
"I do not know anything which relieves the mind so
much from the sullens as trifling discussions about antiquarian
old womanries. It is like knitting a stocking,
diverting the mind without occupying it."<*> Thus his

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ix. 221.

love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of
a mind which only feeds on romantic excitements; rather
was it that of one who was so moulded by the transmitted
and acquired love of feudal institutions with all their incidents,
that he could not take any deep interest in any other
fashion of human society. Now the Scotch law was full
of vestiges and records of that period,---was indeed a great
standing monument of it; and in numbers of his writings
Scott shows with how deep an interest he had studied
the Scotch law from this point of view. He remarks somewhere
that it was natural for a Scotchman to feel a strong
attachment to the principle of rank, if only on the ground
that almost any Scotchman might, under the Scotch law,
turn out to be heir-in-tail to some great Scotch title or
estate by the death of intervening relations. And the law
which sometimes caused such sudden transformations, had
subsequently a true interest for him of course as a novel
writer, to say nothing of his interest in it as an antiquarian
and historian who loved to repeople the earth, not
merely with the picturesque groups of the soldiers and
courts of the past, but with the actors in all the various
quaint and homely transactions and puzzlements which
the feudal ages had brought forth. Hence though, as a
matter of fact, Scott never made much figure as an advocate,
he became a very respectable, and might unquestionably
have become a very great, lawyer. When he started
at the bar, however, he had not acquired the tact to
impress an ordinary assembly. In one case which he
conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of
Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened
with deposition for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour,
he certainly missed the proper tone,---first receiving a
censure for the freedom of his manner in treating the allegations
against his client, and then so far collapsing under
the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and urgency
necessary to produce an effect on his audience. But
these were merely a boy's mishaps. He was certainly by
no means a Heaven-born orator, and therefore could not
expect to spring into exceptionally early distinction, and
the only true reason for his relative failure was that he
was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of
the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional
proceedings, that he never gained the credit
he deserved for the general common sense, the unwearied
industry, and the keen appreciation of the ins and outs of
legal method, which might have raised him to the highest
reputation even as a judge.

All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in
the humours of the law. By way of illustration take the
following passage, which is both short and amusing, in
which Saunders Fairford---the old solicitor painted from
Scott's father in Redgauntlet---descants on the law of
the stirrup-cup. "It was decided in a case before the
town bailies of Cupar Angus, when Luckie Simpson's cow
had drunk up Luckie Jamieson's browst of ale, while it
stood in the door to cool, that there was no damage to
pay, because the crummie drank without sitting down;
such being the circumstance constituting a Doch an
Dorroch, which is a standing drink for which no reckoning
is paid." I do not believe that any one of Scott's contemporaries
had greater legal abilities than he, though, as
it happened, they were never fairly tried. But he had
both the pride and impatience of genius. It fretted him
to feel that he was dependent on the good opinions of
solicitors, and that they who were incapable of understanding
his genius, thought the less instead of the better
of him as an advocate, for every indication which he gave
of that genius. Even on the day of his call to the bar he
gave expression to a sort of humorous foretaste of this
impatience, saying to William Clerk, who had been called
with him, as he mimicked the air and tone of a Highland
lass waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be hired for the
harvest, "We've stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny,
and deil a ane has speered our price." Scott continued to
practise at the bar---nominally at least---for fourteen
years, but the most which he ever seems to have made in
any one year was short of 230_l._, and latterly his practice
was much diminishing instead of increasing. His own
impatience of solicitors' patronage was against him; his
well-known dabblings in poetry were still more against
him; and his general repute for wild and unprofessional adventurousness---
which was much greater than he deserved
---was probably most of all against him. Before he had
been six years at the bar he joined the organization of the
Edinburgh Volunteer Cavalry, took a very active part in
the drill, and was made their Quartermaster. Then he
visited London, and became largely known for his
ballads, and his love of ballads. In his eighth year
at the bar he accepted a small permanent appointment,
with 300_l._ a year, as sheriff of Selkirkshire; and this
occurring soon after his marriage to a lady of some
means, no doubt diminished still further his professional
zeal. For one third of the time during which
Scott practised as an advocate he made no pretence of
taking interest in that part of his work, though he was
always deeply interested in the law itself. In 1806 he
undertook gratuitously the duties of a Clerk of Session---
a permanent officer of the Court at Edinburgh---and discharged
them without remuneration for five years, from
1806 to 1811, in order to secure his ultimate succession to
the office in the place of an invalid, who for that
period received all the emoluments and did none of the
work. Nevertheless Scott's legal abilities were so well
known, that it was certainly at one time intended to offer
him a Barony of the Exchequer, and it was his own doing,
apparently, that it was not offered. The life of literature
and the life of the Bar hardly ever suit, and in Scott's
case they suited the less, that he felt himself likely to be
a dictator in the one field, and only a postulant in the
other. Literature was a far greater gainer by his choice,
than Law could have been a loser. For his capacity for
the law he shared with thousands of able men, his
capacity for literature with few or none.


CHAPTER III.<! p30>

LOVE AND MARRIAGE.

One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar,
Scott offered his umbrella to a young lady of much
beauty who was coming out of the Greyfriars Church
during a shower; the umbrella was graciously accepted;
and it was not an unprecedented consequence that Scott
fell in love with the borrower, who turned out to be
Margaret, daughter of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart
Belches, of Invernay. For near six years after this,
Scott indulged the hope of marrying this lady, and it
does not seem doubtful that the lady herself was in
part responsible for this impression. Scott's father, who
thought his son's prospects very inferior to those of Miss
Stuart Belches, felt it his duty to warn the baronet of
his son's views, a warning which the old gentleman
appears to have received with that grand unconcern
characteristic of elderly persons in high position, as a
hint intrinsically incredible, or at least unworthy of
notice. But he took no alarm, and Scott's attentions to
Margaret Stuart Belches continued till close on the eve
of her marriage, in 1796, to William Forbes (afterwards
Sir William Forbes), of Pitsligo, a banker, who proved
to be one of Sir Walter's most generous and most
delicate-minded friends, when his time of troubles came
towards the end of both their lives. Whether Scott was
in part mistaken as to the impression he had made on
the young lady, or she was mistaken as to the impression
he had made on herself, or whether other circumstances
intervened to cause misunderstanding, or the grand indifference
of Sir John gave way to active intervention
when the question became a practical one, the world will
now never know, but it does not seem very likely that
a man of so much force as Scott, who certainly had at
one time assured himself at least of the young lady's
strong regard, should have been easily displaced even by
a rival of ability and of most generous and amiable
character. An entry in the diary which Scott kept in
1827, after Constable's and Ballantyne's failure, and his
wife's death, seems to me to suggest that there may have
been some misunderstanding between the young people,
though I am not sure that the inference is justified.
The passage completes the story of this passion---Scott's
first and only deep passion---so far as it can ever be
known to us; and as it is a very pathetic and characteristic
entry, and the attachment to which it refers had
a great influence on Scott's life, both in keeping him free
from some of the most dangerous temptations of the
young, during his youth, and in creating within him
an interior world of dreams and recollections throughout
his whole life, on which his imaginative nature was continually
fed---I may as well give it. "He had taken,"
says Mr. Lockhart, "for that winter [1827], the house
No. 6, Shandwick Place, which he occupied by the
month during the remainder of his servitude as a clerk
of session. Very near this house, he was told a few
days after he took possession, dwelt the aged mother of
his first love; and he expressed to his friend Mrs.
Skene, a wish that she should carry him to renew an
acquaintance which seems to have been interrupted from
the period of his youthful romance. Mrs. Skene complied
with his desire, and she tells me that a very
painful scene ensued." His diary says,---"November
7th. Began to settle myself this morning after the hurry
of mind and even of body which I have lately undergone.
I went to make a visit and fairly softened
myself, like an old fool, with recalling old stories till
I was fit for nothing but shedding tears and repeating
verses for the whole night. This is sad work. The very
grave gives up its dead, and time rolls back thirty years
to add to my perplexities. I don't care. I begin to
grow case-hardened, and like a stag turning at bay,
my naturally good temper grows fierce and dangerous.
Yet what a romance to tell---and told I fear it will one
day be. And then my three years of dreaming and my
two years of wakening will be chronicled, doubtless. But
the dead will feel no pain.---November 10th. At twelve
o'clock I went again to poor Lady Jane to talk over old
stories. I am not clear that it is a right or healthful
indulgence to be ripping up old sores, but it seems to
give her deep-rooted sorrow words, and that is a mental
blood-letting. To me these things are now matter of calm
and solemn recollection, never to be forgotten, yet scarce
to be remembered with pain."<*> It was in 1797, after

* Lockhart's Life of Scott, ix. 183--4.

the break-up of his hopes in relation to this attachment,
that Scott wrote the lines To a Violet, which Mr. F. T. Palgrave,
in his thoughtful and striking introduction to Scott's
poems, rightly characterizes as one of the most beautiful
of those poems. It is, however, far from one characteristic
of Scott, indeed, so different in style from the best
of his other poems, that Mr. Browning might well have
said of Scott, as he once affirmed of himself, that for
the purpose of one particular poem, he "who blows
through bronze," had "breathed through silver,"---had
"curbed the liberal hand subservient proudly,"---and
tamed his spirit to a key elsewhere unknown.

"The violet in her greenwood bower,
Where birchen boughs with hazels mingle,
May boast itself the fairest flower
In glen, or copse, or forest dingle.

Though fair her gems of azure hue,
Beneath the dewdrop's weight reclining,
I've seen an eye of lovelier blue,
More sweet through watery lustre shining.

The summer sun that dew shall dry,
Ere yet the day be past its morrow;
Nor longer in my false love's eye
Remain'd the tear of parting sorrow."

These lines obviously betray a feeling of resentment,
which may or may not have been justified; but they are
perhaps the most delicate produced by his pen. The
pride which was always so notable a feature in Scott, probably
sustained him through the keen, inward pain which
it is very certain from a great many of his own words that
he must have suffered in this uprooting of his most passionate
hopes. And it was in part probably the same
pride which led him to form, within the year, a new tie---
his engagement to Mademoiselle Charpentier, or Miss
Carpenter as she was usually called,---the daughter of a
French royalist of Lyons who had died early in the revolution.
She had come after her father's death to England,
chiefly, it seems, because in the Marquis of Downshire,
who was an old friend of the family, her mother knew
that she should find a protector for her children. Miss
Carpenter was a lively beauty, probably of no great depth
of character. The few letters given of hers in Mr. Lockhart's
life of Scott, give the impression of an amiable,
petted girl, of somewhat thin and espi<e`>gle character,
who was rather charmed at the depth and intensity of
Scott's nature, and at the expectations which he seemed
to form of what love should mean, than capable of realizing
them. Evidently she had no inconsiderable pleasure in
display; but she made on the whole a very good wife, only
one to be protected by him from every care, and not one
to share Scott's deeper anxieties, or to participate in his
dreams. Yet Mrs. Scott was not devoid of spirit and self-control.
For instance, when Mr. Jeffrey, having reviewed
Marmion in the Edinburgh in that depreciating and omniscient
tone which was then considered the evidence of
critical acumen, dined with Scott on the very day on
which the review had appeared, Mrs. Scott behaved to
him through the whole evening with the greatest politeness,
but fired this parting shot in her broken English,
as he took his leave,---"Well, good night, Mr. Jeffrey,---
dey tell me you have abused Scott in de Review, and I
hope Mr. Constable has paid you very well for writing
it." It is hinted that Mrs. Scott was, at the time of
Scott's greatest fame, far more exhilarated by it than her
husband with his strong sense and sure self-measu


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